Phonemic Awareness in Chinese L1 Readers of English: Not Simply an Effect of Orthography

Phonemic Awareness in Chinese L1 Readers of English: Not Simply an Effect of Orthography HEATHER J MCDOWELL and MARJORIE PERLMAN LORCH Birkbeck College, University of London London, England The current study investigates the phonemic awareness and nonword processing of English as a foreign language students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, with reference to factors considered the main facilitators of phonemic awareness: written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training The Mainland Chinese students were literate in Pinyin, an alphabetic representation of Chinese, and were first language (L1) speakers of Mandarin Half of the Mainland Chinese students had also been exposed to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in their second language (L2) reading education The Hong Kong students were not Pinyin literate and spoke Cantonese The Mainland Chinese IPA-trained participants performed better than both the Hong Kong participants and the Mainland Chinese non-IPA-trained participants in initial phoneme deletion However, both Mainland Chinese groups outperformed the Hong Kong group on a phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task This pattern of results suggests that phonemic awareness in Chinese L1 readers of English is not simply an effect of orthography, but rather, may be interpreted in terms of access to explicit demonstration of phonemes Further, tests carried out in L2 which are intended to assess metalinguistic awareness may be susceptible to artefacts introduced by the participants’ L1 spoken language INTRODUCTION Phonemic Awareness Development honological awareness (of which phonemic awareness forms one part) refers to explicit awareness of and access to the sound structure of oral language (Wagner, 1988) and is often operationalised in terms of manipulation of the component sound units of a word, for example, the ability to segment the word lip into /l/, /I/, and /p/ or to transpose the P TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 3, September 2008 495 initial phonemes of two words Natural speech perception and production not require the language user to possess conscious awareness of the phonological structure of words; however, analysis and manipulation of sublexical units of sound can be developed into a conscious metalinguistic skill Phonological awareness is a multilevel ability, comprising various differentially acquired subskills (Treiman, 1983) at syllabic, intrasyllabic,1 and phonemic levels (see Goswami & Bryant, 1990, p 2) Awareness at these three levels advances at different developmental stages, involving different cognitive demands Perceptual analysis at the syllabic and intrasyllabic levels is thought to be an innate ability which emerges in the course of normal language development (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974) However, experiments carried out over the last 40 years suggest that the development of intentional manipulation of single sounds (phonemic units) requires specific facilitation Three major sources of phonemic awareness facilitation have been proposed: written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training Much phonemic awareness research has been conducted with regard to written language experience Early studies discovered that, whereas preschoolers are unable to perform phonemic segmentation, this ability improves dramatically with the onset of English reading acquisition (e.g., Bruce, 1964; Liberman et al., 1974) Thus, explicit awareness of phonemes appears to develop out of alphabetic literacy The argument for orthographic experience as a facilitator of phonemic awareness was strengthened by the finding that illiterate adults, like preliterate children, are also unable to analyse words into constituent phonemes (Morais, Bertelson, Cary, & Alegria, 1986) Meanwhile, it is also argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between alphabetic literacy and phonemic awareness, with phonemic awareness equally predicting reading acquisition (e.g., McDougall, Hulme, Ellis, & Monk, 1994) Recent research is driven by the idea that the development of phonemic awareness provides an important substrate for the acquisition of alphabetic reading Research indicates that literacy based on nonphonemic orthographic representations does not give rise to elaborated phonemic awareness (e.g., Mann, 1986; Padakannaya, 2000; Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986) This is consistent with the notion that explicit demonstration of phonemes is required for the development of this metalinguistic skill In addition, the increased attention accorded to individual phonemes in a phonics approach to teaching reading may be the source of explicit 496 Intrasyllabic phonological description defines the initial unit as the onset and the postinitial component as the rime: for example, in the word /fæt/, /f/ is the onset and /æt/ is the rime TESOL QUARTERLY phonemic awareness development in most individuals, rather than the ability to read an alphabetic script per se In this regard, various studies demonstrate that, in English L1 literacy instruction, phonics training is superior to the whole-word approach in raising phonemic awareness (see Adams, 1990) Finally, there is evidence that, within written language exposure, the transparency with which graphemes are mapped to phonemes also affects phonemic awareness development For example, readers of languages with a transparent alphabetic orthography (such as Italian) have been shown to have better-developed phonemic awareness than readers of an opaque orthography (e.g., Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988) A smaller pool of literature suggests that various features of spoken language experience can also promote phonemic awareness development For example, Caravolas and Bruck (1993) found that, even prior to literacy instruction, Czech children show a greater level of phonological awareness for complex onsets (word initial sound units consisting of more than one phoneme) than their English peers The authors suggested that this is because of the rich inventory of complex syllable onsets in the spoken language, requiring more detailed auditory discrimination Similarly, Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, and Hills (2001) found a specific language effect when comparing native speakers of English and Cantonese They suggested that the more complex syllable structure of English (which permits up to three consonants in the onset and coda) as compared with Cantonese (where only one consonant is permitted in onset or coda position) led to superior performance on rime and coda matching Finally, Durgunog˘ lu and Öney (1999) discovered that young Turkish children are better able to manipulate syllables and final phonemes than their English-speaking peers; the authors attributed this to various characteristics of spoken Turkish, including its vowel harmony and syllabic structure This spoken language effect can be described in terms of increased saliency leading to more explicit awareness There is also widespread acknowledgment that oral metalinguistic training, without reference to literacy skills or orthographic form, can facilitate the development of awareness of phonemes For example, Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen (1988) successfully trained a group of English-speaking kindergarten children to segment words into phonemes verbally Similarly, subsegmental oral language games, explicit sound segmentation training, and corrective feedback have also been demonstrated to be effective facilitators of phonemic awareness (e.g., Cheung, 1999; Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987; Morais, Content, Bertelson, Cary, & Kolinsky, 1988) In addition to supporting L1 alphabetic reading acquisition, phonemic awareness is also important for L2 English learners Many EFL students have pre-existing awareness of phonemes from L1 alphabetic litPHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 497 eracy, and there is evidence to suggest that once this has developed, it can be applied to later-learned languages (e.g., Durgunog˘ lu, 1998) However, individuals who have not previously had any explicit demonstration of phonemes in their L1 will require specific exposure in order to develop the phonemic awareness necessary for efficient L2 English decoding Byrne, Freebody, and Gates (1992) demonstrated that although individuals with poor decoding skills may painstakingly acquire a large reading vocabulary, underspecified phonemic awareness can lead to later difficulties in reading fluently, particularly when encountering unfamiliar words Phonemic Awareness in Chinese EFL students The linguistic, educational, and literacy backgrounds of Hong Kong readers of English differ from those of readers from Mainland China, providing an interesting opportunity to investigate phonemic awareness development in L2 learners Both Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese use the same Chinese script for reading The characters used in Hong Kong and Mainland China differ slightly, because Mainland China has adopted simplified characters However, the phonological/semantic composition of the characters remains the same Unlike an alphabetic script used in written English, whose letters notionally represent the language in terms of its phonemes, even if not on a one-to-one basis, the Chinese script uses orthographic symbols to represent monomorphemic syllables in a nonlinear layout (see Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003) The majority of Chinese characters are compounds containing a phonetic radical and a semantic radical which give an approximate guide to pronunciation and meaning, respectively Thus, in the character (ma¯ – mother), the semantic radical performs the categorisation female, whereas the phonetic radical represents the sound of the whole character However, the phonetic radical does not always prove a reliable pronunciation guide, and many characters not have exactly the same pronunciations as their phonetic (Zhou, 1978) Thus, learning to read the Chinese script does not provide any explicit experience of individual phonemes Whereas Mainland China and Hong Kong share the same writing system, the process of literacy education differs In Hong Kong, each orthographic character and its pronunciation are learned by rote, and, when English is introduced as an L2 in school, a whole-word reading approach is commonly taken (Cheung, 1999) Thus, Hong Kong Chinese children typically learn to read an alphabetic system in the form of English L2 without extensive exposure to explicit phonemic-level training However, in Mainland China, L1 reading instruction initially in498 TESOL QUARTERLY volves Pinyin orthographic representations Pinyin is an alphabetic system with a transparent orthography which uses Roman symbols to represent spoken Chinese and is used as a pedagogical aid; it is believed to foster the development of phonemic awareness (Read et al., 1986) Because of their exposure to Pinyin in learning to read, Mainland Chinese EFL students can be assumed to have developed phonemic awareness skills in L1 to apply to the task of learning to read in English In contrast, Hong Kong students who learn to read the logographic (morphosyllabic) Chinese script without Pinyin may not have developed the phonemic awareness necessary for optimal alphabetic decoding To test this distinction, Holm and Dodd (1996) administered tasks of phonological awareness, decoding, and spelling to university students studying in Australia They found that, whereas the Mainland Chinese participants performed at ceiling on most nonword decoding and verbal phonological awareness tasks, those from Hong Kong obtained significantly lower scores These participants demonstrated particular difficulty in creating a phonological representation for unknown words, and appeared to have gained functional literacy in English without elaborated phonemic awareness Holm and Dodd’s (1996) finding of low phonemic awareness in Hong Kong Chinese L1 students with high levels of L2 English reading proficiency has been supported by various studies (e.g., Cheung, 1999; Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005; but see Huang & Hanley, 1995 for a study with somewhat mixed results) These findings call into question the primary role of alphabetic literacy in the development of phonemic awareness If alphabetic literacy were the only key to such development, the Hong Kong students’ extensive experience of reading in English should surely lead to good performance on phonemic awareness tasks In the discussion of their results, Holm and Dodd (1996) concluded that the individuals they studied had acquired functional alphabetic literacy without phonemic awareness despite many years of L2 alphabetic reading Consequently, Cheung et al (2001) suggested that it may be necessary for the first-learned script to be alphabetic in order for phonemic awareness to be acquired However, whereas literacy instruction method was taken into account by Holm and Dodd (1996), a more detailed examination of other potential sources of phonemic awareness facilitation may be useful In particular, explicit training in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)2 is sometimes used in L2 teaching as a tool to improve segmental pronunciation, and this may prove particularly effective in fostering explicit phonemic aware2 In-class IPA exposure typically takes the form of presentation of each sound and its corresponding character The focus is on distinguishing and articulating the different phonemes of English Students are not encouraged to learn to “read” in IPA per se, but to use the IPA characters as an aid to accurate pronunciation PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 499 ness IPA exposure may develop phonemic awareness in a different manner to the exposure of the alphabetic Pinyin script used in early literacy education Phonotactic patterns within the first language may also be a source of variation in phonemic awareness Although both Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese readers use the same script, they speak a number of distinct languages Whereas Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) is widely spoken in Mainland China, Cantonese is the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong There are substantial phonological differences between these two so-called dialects of the Chinese language (Norman, 1988): they have different consonants, vowels, tones, and phonotactic constraints on syllable form In addition, the form of English used in Hong Kong is a nonstandard variety which is heavily influenced by Cantonese phonology (Hung, 2002) This is in contrast to the more standard variety taught on the Mainland Both of these spoken language factors may affect phoneme perception by Chinese students studying English in an immersion environment (e.g., England) and may also have a bearing on performance in phonemic awareness tasks related to reading Component analyses of phonological awareness have suggested that speech perception makes a unique and substantial contribution to this construct (McBride-Chang, 1995), and this may be especially relevant to the performance of L2 learners Phonological representations are derived from L1 experience, such that for later second language learners, L2 phonemes are frequently interpreted in terms of pre-existing L1 categories (Wade-Woolley, 1999) Therefore, the L1 spoken language difference between Mainland and Hong Kong Chinese may be relevant to performance in phonemic awareness tests administered in L2 English An additional consideration is that previous investigations of phonemic awareness in L2 learners have frequently used relatively complex tasks (e.g., Holm & Dodd, 1996; Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003) Even native-English-speaker controls did not perform at ceiling on the tasks used in the study by Holm and Dodd (1996) At this demanding level, students from Hong Kong performed relatively poorly, but it is yet to be determined whether there is a minimum level of phonological awareness which might be sufficient to support alphabetic decoding Native-speaker control groups used in previous L2 phonological awareness studies tend to be university students with an extremely high level of education and extensive reading experience It is possible that atypically well-developed levels of metalinguistic skills exist in such readers Readers more typical of the general population may function efficiently in an alphabetic script without attaining such fine-grained levels of phonological awareness Many questions concerning phonemic awareness in Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese readers of English have been raised by Holm and Dodd (1996) and subsequent studies The current investigation aims to 500 TESOL QUARTERLY extend and refine these findings in several ways First, with respect to participant variables, detailed language education histories are used to document students’ previous exposure to explicit demonstration of phonemes Second, the current study uses two groups of students from Mainland China who had been controlled for IPA exposure Third, the study is carried out with English high school students rather than university students as controls Fourth, tasks of phonemic awareness drawn from previous studies are used only if control participants’ performance was found to be at ceiling (100% accuracy) Because these tasks are designed to tap skills assumed to be acquired by young children, performance by older teenagers that was not at ceiling would indicate the presence of a task artefact METHOD Participants Students born in Hong Kong and Mainland China attending an independent boarding school in England were recruited for this study There is one group of Hong Kong Chinese and two groups of Mainland Chinese students The Hong Kong (HK) group (n = 14; 10 males, females) and one Mainland Chinese (MC) group (n = 8; males, females) had minimal IPA knowledge, reporting that they had never learned it or were unable to match IPA symbols to phonemes; the other Mainland Chinese (MCI) group (n = 8; males, females) had received extensive exposure to IPA training All participants had been initially educated in their home country and were self-reported proficient L1 readers of Chinese with no known reading impairments All are aged between 15 and 19, and studying alongside British pupils in years 9–13 following the standard curriculum, with EFL (English as a foreign language) support where necessary All students are deemed to have achieved International English Language Testing System (IELTS) level 5.5, with no substantial difference in language proficiency between the groups, as rated by the school EFL department’s internal tests Participants who had learned other languages with alphabetic writing systems, and those who had lived in an English-speaking country from infancy were excluded from the study All Mainland Chinese participants had learned Pinyin and were L1 speakers of standard Mandarin; Hong Kong participants had not learned Pinyin and were L1 speakers of Cantonese Participant characteristics for the three groups are given in Table A group of age-matched native English speakers (n = 16) is used as controls to test the stimuli to be included in each task PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 501 TABLE Group Means and Standard Deviations for Age, Years of English Literacy Exposure, and Years of Residence in England Hong Kong Age English literacy exposure (years) Residence in England (years) Mainland China Mainland China + IPA M SD M SD M SD 17.00 12.32 2.83 0.88 1.56 1.64 17.00 6.38 2.16 1.41 2.00 1.16 17.13 5.56 1.60 1.46 1.80 0.62 Note IPA = the International Phonetic Alphabet; M = mean; SD = standard deviation Materials and Procedure The current study uses stimuli from Holm and Dodd (1996) and Cheung (1999), which have been used to investigate phonological awareness in Hong Kong users of English These are used to investigate metalinguistic ability (a) to manipulate individual phonemes and (b) to transcribe nonwords using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules In contrast to the method used by Holm and Dodd (1996), only those tasks are used for which the native-speaker-control-group performance was at ceiling The rationale is that any difference found at this level would suggest a robust distinction at a basic level of phonemic awareness, commonly assumed to be a prerequisite for efficient decoding These tasks were pretested on age-matched native speakers (n = 16), who all performed at ceiling All testing took place in individual 20-minute sessions in a quiet room during the school day (See Appendix for the items that were featured.) Initial Phoneme Deletion In the initial phoneme deletion task, participants were asked to respond with the word which would be left after the initial phoneme is removed Twenty high-frequency monosyllabic English words were selected from the list used by Cheung (1999), in which the deleted phoneme was always a consonant The resultant strings were all words, although they varied in frequency Items included two types of stimuli: simple onsets with single initial phonemes (n = 12) and complex onsets of consonant clusters (n = 8), which are thought to provide a more rigorous test of phonemic segmentation ability (McBride-Chang, 1995) These were presented together in a pseudorandom fixed order (as listed in the Appendix) Two practice items were given prior to the beginning of testing All items were presented orally by the researcher, who also specified the phoneme to be deleted, as follows: “Say share Now say it 502 TESOL QUARTERLY without the /ʃ/ sound.” Corrective feedback was provided for the practice items only Responses to the phoneme deletion task were tape recorded and marked by two independent scorers There was 99.3% agreement between scorers; when they disagreed, the opinion of a third judge was accepted Because this task was intended to measure segmentation ability only, allowance was made for nonnative-like pronunciation Only first responses were accepted, but no time limit was used Phoneme–Grapheme Nonword Matching Reading nonwords aloud is considered a pure measure of how phonological rules are applied (see Nag-Arulmani, Reddy, & Buckley, 2003) The phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task from Holm and Dodd (1996) was used to assess ability to apply phonemic awareness to decoding Using nonwords prevents participants from relying on semantic information, forcing them instead to apply grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules In this task, participants are required to listen to a series of monosyllabic nonwords (n = 20) and select the appropriate match from an array of four written stimuli: (1) the target nonword, (2) a distractor nonword which has a different vowel nucleus, (3) a distractor nonword which has a different postvocalic consonant coda, and (4) a completely dissimilar letter string Ten of the items used were taken from Holm and Dodd (1996), and 10 additional comparable items were added The target stimuli were tape recorded by a native English speaker, with a 6-second gap between items RESULTS Phoneme Deletion The results of the phoneme deletion task (see left columns in Figure 1) were submitted to a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) There was a significant effect of group: F(2,27) = 5.08, p < 0.05, ␻ = 0.46 Posthoc comparisons using Hochberg’s GT2 test indicated that the MCI group (mean [M] = 18.37, standard deviation [SD] = 1.68) significantly outperformed both the MC group (M = 15.12, SD = 1.55, p < 0.05) and the HK group (M = 15.21, SD = 3.06, p < 0.05) The MC and HK groups did not differ significantly from each other A posthoc item analysis was carried out to investigate whether those items with consonant clusters (n = 8) were more difficult than items with single-initial phonemes (n = 12), as has previously been documented in PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 503 FIGURE Percentage Performance Scores by Group on the Phoneme Deletion and Phoneme– Grapheme Nonword Matching Tasks phonemic awareness research (the results are presented separately in Figure 2) The HK group appeared to have specific difficulty with the consonant clusters (M = 4.92, SD = 2.30), showing relatively good performance on those items with single phoneme onsets (M =10.29, SD = 1.93) Surprisingly, the MC group performed relatively poorly on items with simple onsets (M =8.50, SD = 1.60) On the items with complex consonant onsets, their performance was fairly good (M = 6.62, SD = 1.30) The MCI group performed almost at ceiling on both types (single phoneme onsets: M =11.25, SD = 0.88; consonant clusters: M = 7.12, SD = 1.45) Phoneme–Grapheme Nonword Matching An ANOVA conducted on the results of the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task (see right hand bars in Figure 1) showed a significant effect of group: F(2,27) = 6.99, p < 0.01, ␻ = 0.53 Posthoc comparisons using Hochberg’s GT2 test indicated that the HK group (M = 16.85, SD = 1.74) differed significantly from both the MC group (M = 18.75, SD = 0.86, p < 0.05) and the MCI group (M = 19.00, SD = 1.41, p < 0.01) There was no significant difference between the two Mainland Chinese groups 504 TESOL QUARTERLY FIGURE Percentage Performance Scores by Group for the Phoneme Deletion Task (All Items, Single Phoneme Onsets, and Complex Onsets) DISCUSSION This study broadly upholds the findings of previous research carried out by Holm and Dodd (1996) in documenting low phonemic awareness in Hong Kong participants, despite many years of alphabetic literacy and residence in an L2 environment This finding was demonstrated in a simple phonemic awareness task for which monolingual native English speakers performed at ceiling In addition, more detailed investigation reveals effects that are significant with respect to differences in exposure to phonemic-level training and also to the phonemic properties of specific stimuli Of course, it must be said that the robustness of these findings is limited by the small sample size As always, collection of data from a larger cohort, balanced for a range of variables, will be necessary before a firm understanding of these issues can be realised It should be pointed out that the mean scores for all three groups on these simple tasks are fairly high For the forced-choice task, chance performance with four items would be 25%, but for our participants the poorest performance score is 70% While participants produced a good proportion of correct responses in the phoneme deletion task, many participants appeared to experience difficulty in performing the segmentation This was reflected in long delays in response time (up to secPHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 505 onds) and evidence of silent articulation before responding, and several participants reported that the task was confusing Because the nativespeaker control group performed the task with ease, this suggests some difficulty in the explicit manipulation of phonemic material required in this type of metalinguistic task for these EFL students Performance of the IPA-trained Mainland Chinese group is near ceiling on both tasks Whereas the Mainland Chinese without IPA training also performed well on the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task, it appears that they had somewhat more difficulty on the phoneme deletion task The poor performance of the Hong Kong students (given the simplicity of the task) is notable when considering that these students had twice as many years of exposure to English as the Mainland Chinese students (mean years’ exposure to English: Hong Kong group = 12.32; Mainland Chinese [both groups] = 5.97) and had begun to learn English as an L2 in their home country at an early age With regard to the items on the phoneme deletion task, the Hong Kong students appeared to have relatively more difficulty than the other two groups with stimuli that had complex onsets This is the pattern predicted on the basis of previous research findings However, the item analysis reveals that the Mainland Chinese (non-IPA) group had relatively more difficulty with the single phoneme onset deletions This may be because of the greater tendency for some participants to respond according to orthography rather than phonology (i.e., deleting a letter instead of a sound, and reading the result), which was only possible for items with simple onsets For example, several students from this group responded /ɑ:/ rather than /eə/ to the item care It is notable that the erroneous responses produced by the Hong Kong group consisted of 9/31 (29%) responses with inaccurate vowel onsets and 4/31 (13%) orthographically based errors, in contrast with the Mainland Chinese (non-IPA) group of 13/28 (46%) responses with inaccurate vowel onsets but 8/28 (29%) orthographically based errors The large number of orthographically based errors reflects an interesting response strategy given the difficulty these students had with this task The fact that the majority of their errors were ill-formed rather than nonresponses suggests these students were attempting to carry out the phoneme deletion task but were unable to produce an isolated rime due to underdetermined phonological representations Errors not appear to be a function of frequency of target words For example, the common word lay attracted 13 errors, whereas the less frequent pent attracted only As expected on the basis of Holm and Dodd’s (1996) findings, performance of the Hong Kong group is significantly worse than both Mainland Chinese groups on the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task However, the phoneme deletion task results show a different pat506 TESOL QUARTERLY tern; there is clear differentiation between the two Mainland Chinese groups, with the non-IPA group performing relatively poorly, achieving comparable scores to the Hong Kong group It therefore appears that success in the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task is not simply dependent on phonemic awareness Further, the distinction between the IPA- and non-IPA-trained Mainland Chinese in the phonemic awareness task suggests a strong effect of explicit phonemic-level training over L1 orthographic experience Effect of Exposure to Explicit Demonstration of Phonemes In the current study, Mainland Chinese participants with IPA training significantly outperform the other two groups in the phoneme deletion task On the basis of these findings, exposure to explicit awarenessraising activities rather than L1 orthography per se appears to provide a more solid basis for explanation of phonemic awareness development The finding that the Mainland Chinese non-IPA group does not differ significantly from the Hong Kong group in initial phoneme deletion ability calls into question the emphasis placed on Pinyin exposure when considering phonemic awareness in Chinese L1 readers of English The experience of early Pinyin literacy may not be the main contributory factor in fostering the elaborated phonemic awareness necessary for L2 English reading In fact, because Mandarin Chinese has a simple syllabic structure (Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003), its alphabetic representation may not necessarily lead to such fine-grained phonemic awareness In addition, in Pinyin learning, children are only taught to analyse subsyllable units of onset and rime The onset may therefore continue to be viewed as an indivisible whole unit Whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese, onsets are composed of single phonemes, in English, onsets can be composed of consonant clusters which would require further segmental analysis The status of Pinyin as a subsidiary script rather than a fullfledged writing system (Cheung & Chen, 2004) may also limit the effect of its phonemic awareness-raising potential The results of the current study suggest that exposure to explicit demonstration of phonemes may serve as a more important facilitator for EFL students’ phonemic awareness development Influence of Spoken Language Experience The different patterns of performance of the three groups between the phoneme deletion task and the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task suggest that it would be expedient to consider the role of PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 507 previous spoken language experience An item analysis indicates that in the current study phonological perception of L2 may affect task performance; further, it can be argued that previous phonological experience may not only introduce an artefact into testing, but may also affect phonemic awareness development itself The phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task ostensibly tests the application of phonemic awareness to decoding, and also requires grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge However, some errors involve phonemes which were correctly isolated, articulated, and manipulated by the same individuals in the phoneme deletion task In addition, whereas mapping for English vowels can become quite complex, the stimuli used here involved only items with simple graphemephoneme correspondence rules Nevertheless, participants made many mistakes; the majority of these errors concern stimuli consisting of seemingly unproblematic single vowels (e.g., drad was selected for the target drid) Rather than being simply a reflection of phonemic awareness, the pattern of errors observed on this task may be caused by the influence of L2 speech perception processes For example, both Mandarin and Cantonese have the phoneme /s/ but not /␪/ in their inventory, leading to problems in discriminating pos and poth Further, the distinction between the Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong groups on this task (whereas the Hong Kong and Mainland China non-IPA groups have equivalent scores on the phoneme deletion task) may be attributed to spoken language experience rather than to differences in phonemic awareness A closer examination of errors on the phoneme–grapheme nonword matching task reveals that most of the mistakes (31/44, 70%) committed by the Hong Kong group involve selection of the distractor with the incorrect vowel In this regard, it is interesting to note the striking difference in the number of vowel sounds in Mandarin and Cantonese, with some phonologists claiming that Cantonese has 14 vowels (Bauer & Benedict, 1997) whereas Mandarin only has (Duanmu, 2002); the L1 inventory may affect the accuracy of representation of L2 vowels (e.g., Flege, 1987) In addition, students from Hong Kong may also have been affected by exposure to the variant form of Hong Kong English For instance, the most common mistake was the selection of brap for target brep Whereas the stimuli were produced in Standard British English using the phoneme /e/ as the target, in Hong Kong English this would have involved the phoneme /ε/, which appears to have merged with /æ/ (Yip, 2006) Similarly, participants’ difficulty in distinguishing between nisp and nesp may have arisen from the phonotactic constraints of L1 Cantonese or the fact that // does not exist in Hong Kong English (Yip, personal communication, May 10, 2007) This suggests that inclusion of these particu508 TESOL QUARTERLY lar items which are phonologically problematic for L1 Cantonese speakers may have introduced an artefact into this task Whereas spoken language experience may be a significant source of task artefact, it is also possible that this may affect phonemic awareness development itself If the ability to accurately perceive the sounds of speech is prerequisite to the ability to metalinguistically manipulate them, it may be that the Hong Kong group participants, who lack experience of explicit demonstration of phonemes in L1, are at a disadvantage in the development of fine-grained phonemic awareness Furthermore, in terms of spoken L1 exposure, Leong, Cheng, and Tan (2005) suggested that Mandarin may lead to greater phonological sensitivity than Cantonese because of the two languages’ respective phonological structures In the present case, it may also be relevant that, whereas neither Mandarin nor Cantonese contain complex onsets, simplification of consonant clusters is a prominent feature of Hong Kong English (Peng & Setter, 2000) Because consonant clusters appear to be highly important for phonological awareness development (Cheung et al., 2001), this may detract from the development of fine-grained phonemic awareness; it was indeed items containing complex onsets which proved particularly problematic for the Hong Kong students A similar effect of nonstandard English on phonological processing has been suggested for Singapore Colloquial English (Rickard-Liow & Keng, 2003) Thus, the pattern of findings reported here suggests that in testing phonemic awareness, L1 phonological differences in L2 perception may introduce a significant confound; meanwhile, spoken language experience may itself exert an effect on phonemic awareness development CONCLUSION The current study explores the metalinguistic phonemic awareness skills of English users from Mainland China and Hong Kong in light of differences in phonemic awareness facilitation provided by written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training (i.e., IPA) In particular, the study confirms that (1) weak phonemic awareness skills are demonstrated in Hong Kong participants even in a simple phonemic awareness task, (2) patterns of performance in Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong participants might be understood in terms of exposure to explicit demonstration of phonemes (particularly through IPA), rather than availability of an L1 orthographic representation (Pinyin), and (3) language-specific phonological differences in the two Chinese “dialects” might also be a factor in task performance and, by inference, in phonemic awareness development in L2 English readers PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 509 Various implications arise from the current study with respect to both research and teaching practice First, it should be emphasized that an individual’s overall L2 alphabetic literacy proficiency may not directly predict their level of skill development in metalinguistic phonological awareness Detailed linguistic and educational history should be considered, taking into account not only method of alphabetic literacy instruction but also exposure to other forms of explicit demonstration, such as the IPA In addition, the current study highlights the importance of careful evaluation of task demands; this is particularly important when adapting L1 developmental tasks for use with L2 learners When testing L2 speakers, the effect of previous phonological experience should be particularly borne in mind, and both tasks and stimuli should be carefully selected, because items with particular phonological properties may cause specific difficulties depending on L1 background In this regard, although L2 testing is frequently considered reliable (e.g., Geva & Wang, 2001), testing L1 phonemic awareness may provide a less complicated picture Second, this study supports the call made by Holm and Dodd (1996) for specific assessment and facilitation of phonological awareness Further, performance by our participants on the tasks reported above suggests that in the EFL classroom there may be a need for carefully targeted intervention The particular problematic component skill may be either linguistic or metalinguistic and thus require training in L2 speech perception, conceptual awareness of phonemes, or grapheme-phoneme correspondence Our results suggest that explicit phonological training using IPA to improve L2 English pronunciation may enhance the development of phonological awareness Thus, training which is explicitly targeted to improve pronunciation may have indirect benefits in decoding skills, leading to more successful reading of unfamiliar words Further investigation is needed to determine whether the facilitatory power of alphabetic literacy for the development of phonemic awareness differs between L1 and L2 acquirers It is also unclear what provides the most effective means of acquiring elaborated phonemic awareness; more controlled intervention studies are required to demonstrate the relative effects of exposure to various types of phonemic-level training In this regard it would also be useful to perform an IPA-based training study as well as to replicate the current results with a larger sample, including IPA-trained Hong Kong students ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors thank the students at Royal Russell School, South Croydon, for their participation in this study and, particularly, Maria Latessa for facilitating data collection 510 TESOL QUARTERLY THE AUTHORS Heather McDowell is a doctoral student at Birkbeck College, University of London, England Her main research interest is the effect of orthography on phonological awareness and speech processing She has several years’ EFL teaching experience Marjorie Perlman Lorch is Reader in Brain and Language at Birkbeck College, University of London, England, where she has been based for more than 20 years She received her doctorate in neurolinguistics from Boston University Her research interests include clinical, experimental, and theoretical explorations of spoken and written language production, with a specific interest in cross-linguistic comparisons and bilingual speakers REFERENCES Adams, M (1990) Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Bauer, R., & Benedict, P (1997) Modern Cantonese phonology Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter Bialystok, E., McBride-Chang, C., & Luk, G (2005) Bilingualism, language proficiency, and learning to read in two writing systems Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(4), 580–590 Bruce, D (1964) The analysis of word sounds The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 34, 158–170 Byrne, B., Freebody, P., & Gates, A (1992) Longitudinal data on the relations of word-reading strategies to comprehension, reading time, and phonemic awareness Reading Research Quarterly, 27, 140–151 Caravolas, M., & Bruck, M (1993) The effect of oral and written language input on children’s phonological awareness: A cross-linguistic study Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 55, 1–30 Cheung, H (1999) Improving phonological awareness and word reading in a later learned alphabetic script Cognition, 70, 1–26 Cheung, H., & Chen, H.-C (2004) Early orthographic experience modifies both phonological awareness and on-line speech processing Language and Cognitive Processes, 19(1), 1–28 Cheung, H., Chen, H.-C., Lai, C., Wong, O., & Hills, M (2001) The development of phonological awareness: Effects of spoken language experience and orthography Cognition, 81, 227–241 Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I., Katz, L., & Tola, G (1988) Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 1–16 Duanmu, S (2002) The phonology of Standard Chinese Oxford: Oxford University Press Durgunog˘ lu, A (1998) Acquiring literacy in English and Spanish in the United States In A Durgunog˘ lu & L Verhoeven (Eds.), Literacy development in a multilingual context Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Durgunog˘ lu, A., & Öney, B (1999) A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition Reading and Writing, 11, 281–299 Flege, J (1987) The production of ‘new’ and ‘similar’ phones in a foreign language: Evidence for the effect of equivalence classification Journal of Phonetics, 15, 47–65 Geva, E., & Wang, M (2001) The development of basic reading skills in children: A cross-language perspective Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 21, 182–204 PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 511 Goswami, U., & Bryant, P (1990) Phonological skills and learning to read Hove, UK: Psychology Press Holm, A., & Dodd, B (1996) The effect of first written language on the acquisition of English literacy Cognition, 59, 119–147 Huang, H., & Hanley, R (1995) Phonological awareness and visual skills in learning to read Chinese and English Cognition, 54, 73–98 Hung, T (2002) Towards a phonology of Hong Kong English In K Bolton (Ed.), Hong Kong English: Autonomy and creativity Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press Leong, C., Cheng, P., & Tan, L (2005) The role of sensitivity to rhymes, phonemes and tones in reading English and Chinese pseudowords Reading and Writing, 18, 1–26 Liberman, I., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F., & Carter, B (1974) Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, 201–212 Lundberg, I., Frost, R., & Petersen, S (1988) Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 263–267 Maclean, M., Bryant, P., & Bradley, L (1987) Rhymes, nursery rhymes and reading in early childhood Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33(3), 255–281 Mann, V (1986) Phonological awareness: The role of reading experience Cognition, 24, 65–92 McBride-Chang, C (1995) What is phonological awareness? 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Zhongguo Yuwen, 146, 172–177 APPENDIX Table A1 Phoneme Deletion Task land rate share hall clay spent ground near march parts thin bridge stress cold bring start care heat gone small Note Stimuli from Cheung (1999) Table A2 Phoneme–Grapheme Nonword Matching Task Example: hoag orp brev stom losk soav kom dit wug ket slorn drad jom rean nop hom gral peab fod cheg tras hig lun brep blek lasp kerth kesh fras weg koot slern drib feap reg peth haim theg nesp swol beal saig hif lon lang stib foad suv kosh frel wup kej croil drid jol reag pos pras grat nesh fot bol trok slor lup brap stob lask soag selp fral klat layf slerf trop jem prel poth haip grol nisp foat beag tros Note Adapted from Holm and Dodd (1996) The stimulus word is in italics PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHINESE L1 READERS OF ENGLISH 513 ... in Hong Kong is a nonstandard variety which is heavily influenced by Cantonese phonology (Hung, 2002) This is in contrast to the more standard variety taught on the Mainland Both of these spoken... claiming that Cantonese has 14 vowels (Bauer & Benedict, 1997) whereas Mandarin only has (Duanmu, 2002) ; the L1 inventory may affect the accuracy of representation of L2 vowels (e.g., Flege, 1987)... segments and reading ability in Italian children Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 1–16 Duanmu, S (2002) The phonology of Standard Chinese Oxford: Oxford University Press Durgunog˘ lu, A (1998) Acquiring